The first trailer has surfaced for Green Zone, an action-adventure adaptation of Imperial Life in the Emerald City. No, nothing to do with The Wizard of Oz. This Emerald City is an award-winning non-fiction account of America's misadventures in Iraq's American-controlled international zone. A darkly comic, often absurdist tale reminiscent of Catch 22, it would seem to lend itself to an interpretation heavy on the irony, perhaps along the lines of The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Not so much, from the look of this trailer for Green Zone, which seems headed off more in the direction of The Bourne Identity and its progeny. With Bourne Supremacy and Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass at the helm and Matt Damon headlining, I suppose this should come as no big surprise. What we know about the plot so far is that Damon plays a U.S. agent sifting though lies and deception in search of weapons of mass destruction. (I guess we all know how that turns out.) But this first glimpse promises plenty of Bourne-style action and intrigue along the way.

The first domestic trailer for Green Zone showed off a lot of Bourne-like action and intrigue as Matt Damon pursued the hidden mysteries of the Iraq war. Without giving away too much more of the plot, the international trailer puts a bit more emphasis on the intrigue and divided loyalties of the players involved. There are clearly a lot of secrets here that people a willing to kill to protect. Lots more action footage here as well, including some pretty impressive shots of a helicopter going down after being hit by a missile.

The trailer for the upcoming Matt Damon action flick Green Zone sure made it look a whole lot like Jason Bourne in Iraq. Commenting on some action sequences in a new featurette, director Paul Greengrass (who also directed The Bourne Ultimatum) confirms that this was exactly what he was aiming for:

The mission of this film was to ... create a film that is every bit as compelling, every bit filled with action, every bit a privileged inside view to a secret world as the Bourne films. ... It's like somebody pulling on a thread. He pulls on it and pulls on it and pulls on it until he realizes what's going on underneath. And like any great thriller, that drives him on towards his date with destiny.

It's not entirely a Jason Bourne movie, though, and the setting is hardly incidental. As we see here, the thread Damon's character appears to be pulling on is the double-dealing and bad intelligence that surrounded the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This throws an extra dimension of contemporary political intrigue into the mix.

It had been rumored earlier, but now Paul Greengrass, who directed both The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, has definitively announced that he is putting the franchise behind him. Fans had been holding out hope that he might still return if the story were right. But that's just not going to happen, the director says in an interview with CHUD.

I have moved on. I … thought I could find a way to get engaged and make [a fourth Bourne film], [but] I thought in my head there were so many other things and films I wanted to make. I didn't have the fire in my belly. Not that I don't like Jason Bourne, not that I'm not extremely grateful to the franchise, not that I'm extremely close to the studio — there were no arguments. I didn't feel like I had anything else to contribute. It just happens with franchises; you get to a point where you feel like you've done it.

Still, he goes on to say that he wouldn't stand in the way of someone else taking the franchise in a new direction. Indeed, there have been hints of a Bourne prequel, with some actor other than Matt Damon in the title role.

Fans of Damon as Bourne do have something to look forward too, and soon. In what looks to be a very Bourne-like action flick, the Greengrass-directed Green Zone, he plays a soldier on the quickly-evaporating trail of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And in a new set of clips and some behind-the-scenes footage from the movie, we see Damon unraveling the spider web of deception surrounding his mission and, as always, bringing on the action.

Previous attempts at doing an Iraq war move have largely bombed at the box office. Even the Oscar-nominated Hurt Locker hasn't exactly brought in blockbuster receipts. If it wins this weekend, it will be the lowest-grossing best picture in the history of the Academy Awards.

In an interview with Coming Soon, director Paul Greengrass explains how Green Zone's Bourne-appeal just might help it break the curse:

I wanted to make a film with broad appeal. Why? For this simple reason that you couldn't make a Bourne film ... without being very aware that ... that audience was exactly the audience that was being asked to fight this war. The young boys who were being asked to go and fight this thing, were going to see Bourne movies. On the other hand, right around the other side of the spectrum, the young kids who were most opposed to this war were also going to see Bourne movies, see what I mean? They're not going to see small art house movies about Iraq, so to me it was like I want to make a film that those people are gonna want to go and see.

The other key element he felt he had to have in place was just the right setting in which this "high-octane paranoia" could unfold. He found it in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's award-winning non-fiction account of the war, Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

I remember reading the first five pages of the book which is a brilliant sort of evocation of the world of the Green Zone with the Saddam Palaces and the Burger Kings, and the swimming pools, just kind of like an oasis in a f*cked up Baghdad, do you know what I mean? Almost like a sorta Shakespearean court, it's riddled with paranoia and faction fights and of course, the stakes are incredibly high… As soon as I read it, it was like, "Well, that's it. Obviously, our hero's gonna go to the Green Zone and that's where he's gonna get his answers." So, that's why I optioned the book and that's where the book comes in.

Ultimately though, Greengrass recognizes that audiences won't be coming to see this as an Iraq war movie. They will be coming to it to see as a continuation of what he and Green Zone star Matt Damon have done before and to see what they can deliver next. And that's the lens through which the director hopes the movie will be judged.